David Joseph Wrisley (NYU Abu Dhabi, Digital Humanities)
12 Feb 2019
Lecture: The Geolocation of Culture: On the Virtual in Mobile Spatial Humanities Practices
Abstract: Where are we when we are on the Internet? Where are we when we do digital humanities? As digital humanities practices grow, they are increasingly taking place in less physically situated conditions. This talk engages with the idea of the virtualization of such research in the contemporary age. Expanding practices for the collection, analysis and dissemination of humanities data on mobile devices does not imply that a future of humanities work will be fully delocalized–perpetually “on the go” as it were–negating need for physical, experimental spaces of “the big humanities” (Lane). I argue, instead, that a present and a future of humanities content on evolving mobile media (Farman) requires us to pause to consider how they create extensions of physical and institutional situatedness (Pariente-Butterlin). Drawing on a number of examples of spatial humanities work from western and non-western environments (culture mapping, digital cultural heritage, hackathons for app building, crowdmapping) and an increasing literature about mobile apps for culture, I suggest a typology of digital humanities projects in mobile environments, their markers of virtual locatedness, their dependency on geolocation and their forms of sociability.
Bio: David Wrisley is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi. Trained as a comparatist and medievalist, his current research focuses on the spatial humanities, literary criticism using computational methods, the intersection of cultural data and innovative practices in visualization. He has held research fellowships in North America, Europe and North Africa and he is currently Visiting Scholar at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria (Canada). Before joining NYUAD, he was on the faculty at the American University of Beirut since 2002, chairing the Department of English from 2010-14.